Gotta love those bandit signs.

Our phones rang off the hook this weekend due to 30+ bandit signs all over the city this weekend (thanks to Steph in Tampa for giving us a great idea for a compelling ad on our handwritten signs). We're definitely growing the buyers list and its good to have a chance to talk to some of the investors in the area. We have 6 solid leads for our current properties and we'll see what transpires over the next week. Some of the other folks who called were just tire kickers and others ignored the part of the sign that said "CASH ONLY" so we wouldn't be able to do a quick sale with them. They still are potential future buyers but just not on something that we need to move really quick on. In the meantime we're gearing up to line up the funding with the hard money lenders (and potential private lender) for the properties in the event that we rehab them ourselves.

We're also working on establishing business credit for the business. Dustin Mathews has some great training on this topic and we're already putting the plan into action. We applied for a Dun & Bradstreet number so we can establish a credit file for our business. We'll also apply for some trade credit and then some cards. The idea is to establish a good history over the next few months so that we can get some lines of credit available to us to help with funding deals in the future at a lower interest rate.

That's all for now. I'm on pins and needles awaiting the results of this election.

Bingo!

Wow, it's been over a week since my last blog post. We were really fortunate to be spared by Hurricane Ike down here in the South Florida area. Our hearts and prayers go out to those in Haiti, Cuba, Galveston, and Houston who were impacted by the storm. I've dealt with major home damage from hurricanes before and it is a real pain...but nothing compared to what some of the people on the islands have to deal with.

This past weekend was pretty productive. We put out our bandit signs for the first time. I can see this getting old fast though and understand why people pay others to do this. It takes time...and while putting them up isn't so bad, its having to take them down less than 72 hours later that's a real drag! Some of our signs were missing when we came back to pick them up, but we fully expected that to happen. We got 3 calls from the signs so we'll see what comes of that.

On Friday I hit pay dirt. We've been looking for a company that would provide a proof of funds letter so we could make offers on some REOs. The hard money lender didn't want to give the letter unless they actually checked out the property and new it was something they wanted to back. Makes sense but when you're trying to do offers in volume it doesn't help too much. So what I found was companies who do "Dough for a day" loans for back to back settlements -- typically costing about 2 points. Not bad if you have a great deal on your hands don't have a lot of cash laying around or a private money lender. The company will provide our proof of funds letters so we can make cash offers on properties as soon as this week. So we're going to get busy. We have a number of properties that our realtor friend sent us on the MLS. Plus we're going to go through some of the REO properties listed from the banks and contact the listing agents directly.

Goal by Friday of this week? Make 10 offers on properties.

Driving for Dollars

On Sunday I spent 40 minutes driving for dollars...in other words, driving to key neighborhoods of interest to see which homes were for sale, looked abandoned, etc.

I went to one neighborhood and was floored by how many empty properties there were...it wasn't a rough neighborhood (or ghetto as some would call it). In fact, this is your typical South Florida middle class neighborhood....but I wrote down about 10 properties of interest. Some were clearly foreclosed properties - a couple had code violation stickers all over the windows so I'll have to make some calls to see what the scoop is on those.

Other homes had For Sale By Owner so we'll definitely give those a call this week. And lastly, there were a few that were for rent supposedly but it looked like the owners didn't care spend too much time caring for the property because the grass was SO high. We'll call them too...perhaps they really just want to get the property off their hands!

I also wrote down the phone numbers on a handful of bandit signs. We're hoping to establish contacts for our buyer's list and this should be a great way for finding them.

Getting organized

This past weekend was all about getting organized. We put together our business plan for the real estate investment business...it really helped my husband and I think through our vision, goals, and approach (structure, resources, marketing plans, buying and selling strategies). This will also be helpful to show to potential private lenders so that they know what we're focused on.


We signed up for a voicemail service with Got Voicemail - it has some great features. We opted for a local number instead of an 800 number and we'll see how that pans out.


We've also purchased our first set of bandit signs from SuperCheapSigns.com. They have some great templates for real estate investors and have good prices. Not sure if they're the absolute cheapest, but I'm yet to find anything for less so if you're reading this and have suggestions, I'm open!

Anyway, we're focusing on signs for attracting investors as well as sellers. We've learned about a lot of different messages that have been successful for other investors so we're not recreating the wheel. We're trying the simple 'We Buy Houses' as well as the 'Handyman Special - 40% below market value' approach. Hoping to have those signs before Friday so we can get them up on Friday evening.

Today I will print out some business cards so that we'll have that on hand whenever we need them.

We've called real estate agents that we've worked with in the past to let them know that we're looking for properties to invest in - mostly pre-foreclosures and bank owned properties...but essentially if there's a motivated seller then we have something to work with. A good friend of mine is a realtor so we're looking forward to working primarily with her.

By the end of the week I'll also have some ads up on Craigslist.org so we can begin getting the phone ringing.